Stories for May 2 and May 3, 2021

Putting Dennis Herrera atop the PUC is weird. But San Francisco is a weird town.

It would be weird if the mayor transferred a hypothetical general manager of the Public Utilities Commission — with a background touching on engineering and water and wastewater and sewage treatment and hydroelectric power generation and distribution — into leading the City Attorney’s office. The reverse is weird, too. 

COVID Tracker: 36,146 cases, 536 deaths

No longer plateaued, weekly new case averages, positivity rates and hospitalizations decline to pandemic lows.

People we meet: A new job for Leilani Escalante arrived in the mail

“I love feeling the endorphins of being outside and not being inside a building, and also…. having time to just observe and think to myself is nice.” 

Raul Rauda inside DCopper+

People We Meet: Raul Rauda

“We both worked two jobs and saved the money to open this place,” Rauda said. 

Just a snap.

A room of one’s own

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I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder/executive editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.